OLPC: Are We
There Yet?
An update on the One Laptop Per Child Project. SAMEER VERMA
Just the other day, I ran into someone in the
parking lot, who looked at the silly-looking
green laptop slung across my shoulder and
said “Didn’t the founder of that project ditch
and disappear?” News travels fast, no matter
where it comes from, and no matter how
wrong it is. I’m amused.
Of course, I am talking about the One
Laptop per Child (OLPC) Project, founded
by Professor Nicholas Negroponte in 2005.
Conceived as a learning project at MIT back
in the early 1980s (with Professor Seymour
Papert), it morphed into a laptop project in
Cambodia in 1999 and eventually into the
current OLPC Project in 2005. OLPC currently
has more than two million laptops in the
hands of children in more than 25 languages
in more than 40 countries.
I got involved in July 2007, when I first
saw the XO laptop at OSCON (thanks to Rob
Savoye) and instantly fell in love with it. I
quickly signed up with the developer program
and got myself a beta machine. However,
unlike my short-lived affairs with other
gadgets, I’ve hung onto this one for more
than four years now. Along the way, I became
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the de facto organizer for the OLPC San
Francisco volunteer community. OLPC also has
found a spot on my research agenda. I now
run projects in Jamaica, India and Tuva (yes,
that Tuva, of Richard Feynman fame), and I
help out with others in Armenia, Madagascar,
Morocco and a whole bunch of other places.
Making technology work in remote places
has been a welcome challenge. Making it
work for children the world over has been a
fulfilling experience.
Hardware
Speaking of laptops, the lean, green children’s
machine is quite the icon. It gathers crowds
with little effort. It brings forth the inner child
in many a tough adult. Let’s take a peek into
what’s under the plastic. Table 1 shows the
different incarnations of the OLPC XO laptop.
The XO has many cool features. It is
rugged, solar-chargeable, has a sunlight-readable screen, supports mesh networking
and has a very aggressive suspend-resume
cycle, but the importance of these features
supersedes their coolness when deployed in
the field. One of my projects is in Bhagmalpur,
